Entry 37: Harlequin’s Poles- Several bodies ago, I read Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man by Harlan Ellison. Now, isn’t that an appropriately sci-fi opening sentence? The belief that the human body turns over on a cellular (or is it atomic?) level every 7 to 10 years has whiskers on it, of course.
George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to one of his novel’s wrote in 1905, Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed
at such a rate that no part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since joined the majority. Fourth of his line, I cannot be expected to take any very lively interest in the novels of my literary great-grandfather.
Interesting thought: can we shed responsibility for our actions as easily as we shed skin cells, I wonder? 
Richard Feynman, one of the truly great minds of 20th Century science, relates, once in Hawaii, I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple, a man said, “I am going to tell you something that you will never forget.” And then he said “To every man is given the key to Heaven. The same key opens the gates of Hell.”
He went on to write, in an essay entitled The Value of Science, the thing I call my individuality
is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out – there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.
One of the dances he was remembering was the fact that he, as a member of the Manhattan project, was one of the architects of the Atomic bombs that obliterated the 
centres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
But let’s go back to Harlequin and the Ticktock Man. We have all the time in the world; unlike the dystopia of the short story where human beings are rigorously regimented and where falling behind schedule is punishable by having that time taken away from your allotment of that precious commodity. When your time runs out, the Ticktock Man switches off your heart- although whether your heart was ever really a going concern is a question posed by this piece of speculative fiction.
The image of the harlequin reminds me of the reality of my employment for more than
40 years. My life was punctuated by bells as I rushed from class to class or class to staffroom or staffroom to class, always behind, arms full of exercise books not yet marked, the Ticktock Man pursing his lips as, once again, I stumbled into the classroom to be faced with faces waiting with me for the summons of the next bell.
Like a lot of people, clowns have not been a joyful memory from childhood but a vision that has usually had ambiguous overtones. Charlie Chaplin’s “The 
Tramp” is one of the most memorable clown variants and in The Great Dictator the great comic showed greater insight than most of his contemporaries in satirising the contemptible Nazis and their odd-looking leader. The representation of the clown as trickster plays to our dislike of those in power and we cheer when pomposity is punctured yet remain wary of the jeering japester who capers on the edge of our comfort zone sneering sardonically at our incapacity for truly independent action; the sad ordinariness of us.
But there is respite from the mundane humdrum of the daily round that consumes us from the tick of eyelid snapping open to the tock of it drawing down the blinds on another rotation. And that respite takes many forms. For some, it is the opening of a novel at the
exact spot where the promise of swift submersion beckons like a lover’s arms; for others, closing the door on the world to resume a passion (or hobby) suffices. For only a few does it comprise what occupies most of our waking hours. Which explains the persistence of poetry.
As Carl Sandburg says, Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog. Or, as he more mischievously defines it, Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. An interesting, final definition, Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches. Collins 
dictionary defines buck-and-wing as a boisterous tap dance, derived from Black and Irish clog dances. Dance, like music, is inextricably bound up in time yet together they conspire to overcome its tyrannical hold on our existence.
So let’s dance on, oblivious to the Watcher at the window, waiting for the music to stop; waiting for the process to resume its relentless tick-tock goose-step, to take us over the edge of everything that ever was.
Entry 38: Airman- Who do you think you are? What a wonderful title for a TV concept. We are all a bit curious about who we are and where we come from. As kids, of course, we riff on the idea that we are, in fact, the progeny of aristocrats or some impossibly glamorous couple who have somehow become sundered from their child who is now, for some unfathomable reason, languishing in a common-or-garden family from Dullsville. If only we could be re-united!
and flashing bulbs as the paparazzi of the world clambered over one another to gain the perfect shot of the perfect lost child now returned to the bosom of the perfect family waiting in their until-now-imperfect paradise which is now complete and unassailable. Some say this is the reason that stories of blue heaven are replete in the literature of the world’s religious traditions: at heart, we are all kids yearning for apotheosis. (By the way, do you respond positively to the image of the family here? What do you think when I tell you that this is an image made by the Nazis to promote their ideas of what the family should be?)
Australia from Ireland, I was trying to acclimatise by reading the poets of the place. This seemed (and seems) to me as good a way of getting to know the lie of the land as any other. Feeling homesick, I wondered if I would see my parents and siblings again.
In 1964 we had returned to Northern Ireland, for the last time, from the sunny sojourn that was my childhood; from the Lotus Land that was the small Caribbean island of Aruba where my father had worked for twenty five years as a tug-master for the oil company founded by old man Rockefeller, one of the icons of Capitalism. From time to time, to break the monotony, I would rummage about in the attic of a rainy day- and the small coastal village of Cushendall had more than its share of these that year, as I remember it.
leather handles, piles of newspapers, copies of The Irish News from the years of the Second World War. And I began to read: there in black and white was the frisson of living in exciting times. A newspaper that doesn’t know if it will publish the next day, courtesy of a German bomb, has rather more focus than the indulged rags of peaceful epochs.
but has watched a U-Boat blow a friend out of the water, literally. Strange how glibly that phrase “blown out of the water” falls from the mouths of those who have never been closer to conflict than raised voices, a shove or a drunken slap.
broach. My mother, meanwhile, an ocean away, helped console the shattered survivors of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Belfast.
expatriate Americans: You can bet the refinery will be hit! The periodicals were full of details of how to build bomb shelters. The commie bastards would, of course, be utterly destroyed. MAD was more than a magazine title, in those days.
day-to-day existence. The archaic Roman concept of homo sacer may be illuminating here: it refers to the accursed man, that is, a person who is outside the protection of the law and may be killed with impunity. Wanted: dead or alive and shoot on sight are aligned with this concept.
The common folk have always celebrated those who stick it to the man. The common lot of the common man, woman and child is to endure the insults and imposts of authority as part of their lived experience. The legend of Robin Hood is probably as old as Chaucer and robbing the rich to give to the poor will always have massive popular support if for no other reason that there are far fewer of the former than the latter.
potently, in the games of children. Born a Catholic in Northern Ireland, I absorbed tales of heroes and rebels from Cú Chulainn to James Connolly. Cú Chulainn was quite a lad; listen to this anecdote about him,
he had not finished his prophecy—the warrior who took arms that day would be famous, but his life would be short. 
In late 1969, I was in my college room with the British-born co-editor of the magazine we had named TET after the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong coordinated attacks of the year before. The mag was filled with the bog-standard lefty student satire of the late 60s. We were coolly ironic and I was playing I am the very model of the modern major-general at volume.
singing: A great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham…the opening line of one of the most popular rebel songs- James Connolly. After this rousing riposte to the quintessentially British ditty I had been playing, we all laughed good-naturedly.
In Australia, I found a place that was a sanctuary that was familiar but strange at the same time. The anti-authoritarianism, sense of humour, folk music and love of the underdog were like an old coat but the rips, leeches, spiders and swooping birds punctured the homelike elements, somewhat. Before too long I was playing in a couple of folk ensembles, one Irish and one Australian.
Nolan certainly thought so, producing a series of paintings featuring the outlaw with his iron helmet on horseback in a variety of evocative Australian landscapes.
Bill Dargin he was chosen to shoot the outlaw dead,/The troopers then fired madly and they filled him full of lead,/They rolled him in his blanket and strapped him to his prad,/ And they led him through the streets of Forbes, to show the prize they had.
have achieved and what, if anything, you can pass on. Consider a tramp dying in a ditch with nothing except holes in his pockets before the gates of a mansion filled with the products of opulence owned by a man who has fleets of ships and warehouses filled with consumer goods. Can you judge which man has more claim as to who is the better person? Which one is worthier of salvation? Do you need more information or will you leave the decision to a higher power, say, the Twittersphere?
Patrimony is defined by Merriam-Webster as anything derived
from one’s father or ancestors. It may be material and exogenous, such as that mansion or something less tangible but nevertheless real- such as an inheritable characteristic such as a predisposition to…what? Let us conduct a mind experiment where the progeny of St Francis of Assisi and Snow White are set against the issue of, say, Adolph Hitler and Cruella De Ville.
The children: a boy and a girl from each union, are stranded on a
sinking ship. There are only two places left on the last lifeboat. You must choose who is to be saved. Do you save the girls? The boys? The pair from the forces of Good or those of the forces of Evil? Or one from each family? Choose. Perhaps you want to leave that to the Twittersphere, too…
I am referring to Billy the Mountain, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention from an LP I bought in Wollongong in 1973 entitled Just Another Band from LA. I lost it, with a whole lot else, somewhere in the Seventies. For a fistful of digital dollars, I have recovered the lost item. Now, whether it’s a blessing or a curse
remains to be seen. But back to the questions posed earlier: have you consulted anyone? Played a lifeline, perhaps? Where, or to whom, do you turn? As for me- I trust the artists- and the poets, in particular.
I am the family face;/ Flesh perishes, I live on,/ Projecting trait and trace/ Through time to times anon,/ And leaping from place to place/Over oblivion.
faults and foibles that I possess in more than abundant measure, I spread the blame down the endless years back to our ancestral mother and father, and thus, feel that I am able to go on living. So, if I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to discount the concept of Original Sin.
the fathers visited on subsequent generations and use it as an excuse. Worth a try, anyway. Yeah, I know, I’m not fooling anyone, am I? I can’t answer the question of who should be allowed in the lifeboat. Our whole world is a lifeboat and the few privileged individuals who have stood outside it have attested to the ineluctable conclusion that we are all inheritors of the most precious gift the universe can bestow- our blue planet.
Moon, written by Robert Hunter back in the late Eighties. Only twelve people in the history of the Earth have, in fact, stood on the moon. How many can you name? After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, I mean? Even one?
Me? I turn to poetry. Billy Collins, the American poet laureate, wrote a brilliant poem entitled On Turning Ten. The last stanza: It seems only yesterday I used to believe/there was nothing under my skin but light./If you cut me I could shine./But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,/I skin my knees. I bleed. Do yourself a favour: find the whole poem and read it. Patrimony is really just the good stuff we tell each other.
Entry 41: Rose- Family secrets: everyone knows one or more about their own family and one or more about other families, if only through the media. What one generation may hang its head in shame over the next, more likely than not, just shrugs and says, so what! The convict stain in Australian society became a badge of honour in the space of a generation or two.
forbears are more likely to advertise relationship to a pirate than an accountant. Note also, that privacy for individuals becomes an increasingly rare commodity in inverse proportion to the growing obfuscation surrounding the activities of transnational corporations and governments. The contradictory signals make reading the signs of the times about as reliable as the practice of palmistry.
and coal-fired power station emissions deal with the moon for a lot of people a lot of the time. And the truth? The Roman procurator of Judea sometime around the end of the third decade of the first century asked what that was and the question has reverberated down the millennia since.
Two girls discover/the secret of life /in a sudden line of/poetry./I who don’t know the/secret wrote/the line. 
chosen few. Such as the rosy cross of the Rosicrucians. Roman banquet halls had roses painted on them so that matters discussed there under the influence of wine (sub vino) would also remain sub rosa or secret.
to decipher what, if any, meaning lay hidden in the arrangements held by friends they might encounter in their perambulations.
The Grateful Dead’s version of the Dylan classic, Visions of Johanna, sung by Jerry Garcia before a crowd at the Delta Centre in Salt Lake City, Utah in February 1995: it’s a fitting close to the 2015 release of 30 Trips Around the Sun: The Definitive Live Story.
I first knew her as a photograph of an elegant Edwardian lady in an oval frame hanging in the reception room of my childhood home in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. My enquiries were deflected, brushed off with the bare bones info that this was my father’s mother but not the one who raised him.
gained access to her medical records through FOI legislation and I was hurt to read about her pain, set down in clinical prose by the treating physician.
Entry 42: Oblivion Mountain- You hang on to what is familiar, don’t you? Like Linus from Peanuts, have you a favourite blanket? Or an old rag doll passed down from great grandma? For me, books, first, and then music and the guitar have been sources of comfort and escape. Radio also was a refuge. Like so many people on the periphery of the great goings-on, I could stay abreast with events at the centre of the maelstrom through this medium.
Halfway through my sojourn in North Queensland in 1991, I was listening to Phillip Adams, the new presenter of Late Night Live on the ABC. I thought Europe had turned its back on the excesses of World War II but it was clear that a new barbarism had emerged as if it had never gone away at all. As Yugoslavia split apart, the various militias showed the world what atrocity really meant.
in the death camps of the Nazis in 1945; the siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days which was one year longer that the siege of Leningrad during World War II.
Boško Brkić, a Bosnian Serb, decided to flee the city. Having friends on all sides involved in the conflict, there was a general thought that their passage through the city and its infamous Sniper Alley, under constant fire from hills occupied by the Serbs, could be a safe one. An arrangement was made for 19 May 1993 at 5:00 pm that no one would fire as the couple approached. According to Dino Kapin, who was a Commander of a Croatian unit allied at the time with Bosnian Army forces, around 5:00 pm, a man and a woman were seen approaching the Vrbjana Bridge. As soon as they were at the foot of the bridge, a shot was heard, and, according to all sides involved in their passage, the bullet hit Boško Brkić and killed him instantaneously. Another shot was heard and Admira Ismić screamed, fell down wounded, but was not killed. She crawled over to her boyfriend, cuddled him, hugged him, and died. It was observed that she was alive for at least 15 minutes after the shooting.
Sebrenica massacre in July 1995 when the genocidal killing of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys preceded the forcible transfer of between 25,000 and 30,000 Bosniak women, children and the elderly which was found to be confirming evidence of the genocidal intent of members of the Bosnian Serb Army Main Staff who had orchestrated the massacre in what the UN had declared to be a safe area.
Rape on a vast scale was used as a tactic by this group- and a new term entered our lexicon of horror: ethnic cleansing. Goran Simic’s poem, The Calendar is a stark reminder of the cost on a personal level among all the statistics.
cake at the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin place in 2014 would have turned into a horror show so soon after 28 Australians were among the 298 innocent civilians slaughtered above the Ukraine in July 2014 as a missile tore apart Malaysian Airways Flight 17. Meanwhile, on the ground below that fateful explosion at 33,000 feet, civilians continue to die, to starve, cut off from the benefits of life in the prosperous world of Europe in the second decade of the 21st Century.
waiting for the rest of the group to arrive for our practice session. I was early and I picked up my guitar and started to strum. On the far wall, a TV showed images of a Balkan War scene and gradually the music of Oblivion Mountain began to take shape. By the time the rest of the group arrived, I was scribbling the verses of the song onto my notepad.
box? If instead, you were faced with a large jar, one large enough to house a body you might instead just give up especially if it were inhabited by Diogenes the Cynic who often slept in one in the marketplace of Ancient Athens.
He was known for his philosophical exercises such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. In his translation of the myth in the 16th Century, Erasmus renders the Greek word pithos which means a large jar- with pyxis which means a small box. From that time, reinforced by painters’ treatment of the myth, box it remains.
Zeus, somewhat miffed at Prometheus for gifting Man with fire, commanded Hephaestus to fashion Pandora out of clay. Let me say now that, when I referred to humanity as Man before, it wasn’t a PC lapse.
advanced society by creating woman. Thus, Pandora was created as the first woman and given the jar which releases all evils upon man. The opening of the jar serves as the beginning of the Silver Age, in which man is now subject to death, and with the introduction of woman to birth as well, giving rise to the cycle of death and rebirth.
hope is left in the box, what sort of hope is being referred to? My head hurt after reading the many contending views so I’ll just cite the astringent argument of Nietzsche and leave it for you to sort out,
he fancies it. For he does not know that the jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good—it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.
Some mistakes you profit from- I refer here to the pithos to pyxis of Erasmus: how else could I draw the line so strongly between older TVs where the cathode ray tube nestles in a box-like housing, with the ills which stream from the contraption into the world of the 20th Century where I have lived the majority of my life? TV was also called the idiot box and blamed for all sorts of ills that poured from it- inciting teens to promiscuous sex and the like.
The metaphor doesn’t work in the 21st Century though: flat-screen TVs aren’t boxlike and, in any case, the exploding world of alternative devices and ways of receiving information and entertainment means that no longer do we crouch before the electronic sage in the corner, communally absorbing its emanations. But for a few generations, it was a way of life and Howard Nemerov, in a poem entitled A Way of Life, spoke for those now receding generations,
fire behind.
preternatural strength, swamp monsters, assorted trolls, goblins and giants from grim folk tales peopled?…no, creatured my hungry, youthful imagination fed by books and movies that seem quaint today beside the chic- ironic, yet puerile, slayer in designer clothes wisecracking to befuddled, barely-comprehending adults as demons explode in colourful pixels against the point of her post-modern wooden stake.
Another generation’s hunger for information about the dark side is nourished by a flashier special- effects menu than was available to mine. And those years of feeding at the table of horrors wasn’t preparation enough to enable me to comprehend the real horrors that lurked in recent history. I remember when Eichmann was captured by the Israelis and tried in Jerusalem. I looked in vain for the mark of the Beast on those bland features. I had read The Scourge of the Swastika and stared at stark photographs of black-booted sinisters, some smoking nonchalantly, standing over pits of murdered people. Could this bespectacled clerk be the author of so many deaths?
nsee Conference so many years ago.
But the English fails to capture the black angularities of the original: for that, go to YouTube and listen to the poet himself reading this work. The world of the poem is one of shouting, digging, dark music playing, serpents, dogs, glittering stars, smoke, whistles, stabbing and two women: the golden haired Margarete and the ashen haired Shulamith.
. My mind is not filled with the scorpions tyrants have to contend with nightly. C.S. Lewis, author of those innocent, those enabling fictions, the Narnia tales, also wrote The Screwtape Letters during the dark years of the Second World War. His readers, avid for more insights into the Satanic mind, were disappointed when he called it quits. He could no longer bear the burden of dwelling imaginatively in those dark regions. He feared for his very soul. And rightly so.
Human life needs light and love and natural things and if this means a quotidian existence where one has to forgo the depths of Faustian knowledge and the heights of Elysian experience, then, so be it. Limits are, often, not so much limiting, as lifesaving, after all. And again and again poets come to the rescue.
And another from James Arlington Wright entitled A Blessing where, with a friend, he greets two Indian ponies in their meadow, in itself a metaphor of love. One of the ponies has walked over and nuzzled his hand,
that rural dance-hall in Ireland in the late 1960s- a trio, with my brother and cousin? Maybe it was an atavistic, male, cautionary tale, but I can remember a shiver of premonitory trepidation as I approached the first girl in the line at the opposite end of the fluorescently-lit hall.
The accent was a lilting brogue that brought welts up on my soul. I could feel the eyes: from across the hall, my brother and cousin smirking and a ruck of male unknowns- as well as the sidelong glances and micro-expressions of amusement from the girls who had heard the put-down, stretching, as it seemed to me, to the crack of doom.
answer but turned away and continued a conversation with her friend. I don’t have to go on, do I? In some sad corner of my imagination I am in that dance-hall to this very day, moving along a line of increasingly lovely girls who reject me in a variety of fiendishly humiliating ways.
nightclubs and dance-halls during the latter half of the 1960s. Club Rado and the Jazz Club, Romano’s and the Astor in Belfast, the Marquee in Cushendall and Castlegreen on the road to Ballycastle were among the magical places where people could meet and mingle to music that was of a surprisingly high quality.
Enniskillen and then a couple of days in a cabin on Lough MacNean bisected by the Irish border. This was in 1985. Having driven for some hours, feeling a bit tired from the trip, I sat out on a bench with my guitar and watched the water-birds among the reeds. A sequence of notes stuck in my head and I started to find the accompanying chords.
The original ballroom of romance was located across the Lough in the nearby village of Glenfarne: a famous location drawing crowds from the surrounding parishes for generations. I had viewed the short movie about this place a few years before. Starring Brenda Fricker, the evocation of the desperation faced by her 36-year-old character Bridie who has been putting on her best dress every Friday night for twenty years in order to attend the Ballroom of Romance has stayed with me for decades.
emigration and lost love. Set in the eponymous ballroom in 1950s rural Ireland, it is by turns, poignant, funny and excruciating as we follow Bridie from the farm she shares with her crippled father to the windswept dance venue. She hopes to form an alliance with the drummer in the trio which is providing the music for the dance. He is dependable, doesn’t drink and will be able to help her run the hardscrabble hill farm when her ailing father dies.
She realises, however, during the tea-break, that his landlady has her hooks into him and, so, she retires from that romantic field of battle. Her only other choice is one of another trio: three middle-aged boozy no-hopers who attend the dance every week after fuelling up at the nearby pub. Bowser Egan is the man- not of her dreams, for that person emigrated to England when she was still a young woman, nor is he the second choice, for the silver medal goes to the drummer in the band.
as she makes her way towards home on her bicycle, he renews his suit, promising to come and see her as soon as his mother has gone to meet her maker- a reformed man who will even make her a little flower garden. Then, a pause, and his main reason for being there, Will you come into the field, Bridie?
In some meeting, in some relationship, in some internal conversation you have had with yourself- perhaps as part of a cognitive behaviour therapy you are undergoing?
This was not perceived as being out of order because my life had been, for so many years, constructed out of these bricks of self-destruction. Why they did not crash down upon my head? I have had reason to reflect upon it the years since. So many times I have been, because of my affection for the demi-monde and, particularly, alcohol, in situations of considerable danger.
for my survival- but I know that is part of this whole magical thinking phenomenon. We all live till we die. Nothing will alter the fact that there is a limit to life. Do you want to live forever? Not me, but, given the choice, I don’t want to go just yet! So much to do; so much to see; so much to… you get the drift.
well be familiar with. But what do you think about this insight into the nature of perception:
is just absolute shite, the opposite of what James Joyce famously termed as an epiphany. Yet, just about everyone I know; everyone who has spoken to me about the deep and meaningful stuff, has, at one time or another, talked about “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind–the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it.” 
And here’s the thing: I hate listening to others wittering on about their meaningful objects, scenes, events, et cetera. And I’m going to do just that. At the turn of the millennium…actually the year 2000, but who’s counting, my eyesight began to fade, I was feeling dreadful- beyond hangover, which I was habituated to. I felt mortality pressing down on me more than usual and the dreams of death were becoming tiresomely frequent.
1996 when my doctor told me not to return to work the next day (as I was in danger of dropping dead at any second) and sent me on a round of tests and dosed me with a large number of pharmaceutical products that finally got the blood pressure under control.
Someone spouting crap in multisyllabic torrents as nodding heads around the table give assent to the madness. So, I nodded with the panic dwarfs and waited for too many years until the mortgage was paid and the government decided that it could pay me a stipend, called the age pension for the rest of my days. What was this apophany?
something. And that you do, too. Insane, isn’t it? William Blake put it in these terms, To see a world in a grain of sand/And heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour. Lord, where would we be without our poets?